I was just reading my Farmer’s Almanac for this year and found out the meaning behind the term “Victory Garden.”
In 1588 Queen Elizabeth sent riders out into the country side to tell the folks out there to prepare for war. One of the main things that was told to everyone through out the land was to plant extra food in their home gardens because without it they would be going hungry. This is was part of the reason the English were victorious over the Spanish invasion!
Likewise during WW2 the department of agriculture told people to start home gardens (which at that time were few and far between here in the U.S.) to relieve the demand for food in the grocery stores. Many families took this advice and ate better (and a lot healthier) for it!
So, the Victory Garden is just that – a sustainable way for families to maintain themselves during times of war. Thinking about all of the ways this effects the whole country is amazing to me. A war can be won due to sustainable living, in particular – gardening for our selves and not relying on the grocery stores to be there for us.
This is just as true now as it was back then. Gardening this way can conserve energy and also keep us healthier!
Last night with dinner I made a plate of tomatoes with lime juice, salt, pepper and fresh cilantro on top from my indoor garden! Here is a picture:
I see earlier posts for when these seeds were started.
Well, the tomatoes are about 6-8 inches tall now, and they are getting a little wobbly. I will be staking them with chopsticks to start off with. It won’t be too much longer before I will need real garden stakes, and I might need to separate them. We’ll see how unruly they get as they get larger. 🙂
A few more days until I will be eating fresh salsa from my cilantro! It is ready to harvest now, although I could easily let them grow for a few more weeks probably. That’s about one month seed to table for an early tender harvest. If you really want mature plants the thing to do is to stake each one as soon as it has mature leaves out. Mine have all fallen over, but are not dying at all. They are happy falling over and the next leaves that came are pointing up. I prefer the taste of very young leaves as opposed to the greener broader leaves that are on a more mature plant.
I will post pictures later!
Thanks for stopping by.
-Sara
Here is a short tour of my current indoor garden setup.
[flashvideo file=”https://sarasgardenmarket.com/videos/indoorg_tour_large.flv” /]
My seedlings for the Cilantro, Basil and Tomatoes have been up for a few weeks now and doing great! The Cilantro is a bit unruly, so I have it staked with the first thing I grabbed which was a pencil and a paint brush! The tomatoes will need to be separated at some point but they are happy together right now. 🙂
These plants I will be saving indoors for the exclusively indoor garden. Seed to table, to see if I can do it all indoors. This will involve my pollinating the flowers myself, which I’m not sure how to do yet. I’m sure Patti Moreno can show me how!
Thanks for stopping by!
I started some annual flower seeds indoors this week. My daughter, Maddie, helped me plant them. The seeds were so darn small I wasn’t even convinced that we had planted anything at all! But the baby Alyssum is up!
These seedlings are so small and delicate that I am not at all convinced they will live, but if they do we will have some nice ground cover and some for our containers too.
The other half of the flat that you see here has “Sunshine” Petunias in it…maybe… The seeds were so small they just looked like a bunch of sawdust really. I’ll give them another week and if no one comes up I have some regular Petunias I will be starting in there.
Thanks for stopping by!
Sara M
My tap water is so hard and full of chlorine that I have to find a different source for watering my plants.
The very first thing I did when I noticed that the chlorine was burning my plants was to go to the store and buy 3 jugs of water immediately! I was in a panic and I was worried that all my house plants were going to die! As I was using the water I kept thinking about it, and I had heard about using rain barrels etc…
And then I looked outside!! Our landscape is covered in a blanket of about 3-4 feet of snow right now and will be for at least another month or more. In fact, last year we got a snow storm in April that was feet deep. What better source for water! (Duh right?) So I am now watering all of my plants and seedlings with snow that I melt down and place in one of the empty jugs of water. (I also use a very light water soluble fertilizer every time I water.)
Thanks for stopping by!
Sara M
I have started my indoor garden!
So far it consists of a small shelf, lots of shop lights with daylight bulbs and one with a grow bulb in it. I have some old pots that I am using as well as a few new seed starting trays with biodegradable seed pots inside for transplanting.
The regular pots that you see that are not specifically for seed starting are the pots that I want to try growing veggies and herbs from seed to table all indoors. Then maybe next Fall when everything is dieing outside I won’t feel so sad because I know I can really garden indoors year-round.
So far in those pots I have cilantro, basil and 5 tomato plants.
The seed starting trays will have flowers and veggies that I will transplant into the outdoor garden in the Spring. The packets say to start the veggies 6-8 weeks before planting, which means I am still waiting on a lot of that for 1 more month. The first safe planting here is the 3rd week in May!
So far all the plants are very happy and healthy. I have the lights on 12 hours per day, and I have a small fan on them almost all the time as well.
Thanks for following!
Greenly, Sara M
In my search for the eternal summer I have started an indoor garden here in Minnesota! The purpose; to be able to garden from seed to table year-round.
I have started some seeds indoors before with mixed results. Most of the seedlings got too tall and toppled over and died. Some of them were too wet all the time and their roots rotted. When it finally came time to transplant these babies to the outdoor garden the majority of them died because they were not hardened properly. There are a lot of gardeners out there, particularly in the Northern United States that just go buy their plants at the garden stores at the start of the season claiming that starting seeds just doesn’t work.
Patti inspired me to try again with the seed starting and also to try a full out indoor garden! She has so many videos and so much awesome information on how to do it all how could I go wrong?
So, apparently the first time I tried to start seeds I did not have an adequate source of light. That’s why the plants got too tall – they said “I need light!!!!!!!!!!!!” Also, when you garden indoors you need more movement in the air so the top soil dries out in between waterings to prevent root rot. This air circulation also helps in the hardening process before you transplant! All of this makes a lot of sense, so I am going at it again!
Thanks for coming along for the ride!
Greenly, Sara M.
